In Boston for TransCultural Exchange

Two clicks, if you move left from the center, it is me, somewhere at the back, trying to snap an image and capture the feeling of the opening gala of the TransCultural Exchange 2016 (super sharp effect of my tries is to see below). First of all I would like to express my gratitude to Mary Sherman, the mastermind behind the concept of biannual meetings, for inviting me to moderate a panel, and meet all this amazing makers and cultural gurus. Secondly, through out the conference I could speak with some old and newly made friends. The conversations made me realized that I really miss producing and being actively in the field. Lets see what kind of changes will bring the next months of 2016 ;)

As a recap of the intensive days filled with presentations, workshops, discussions, food&drinks I have set together stories of people I had a pleasure to meet in hope you can meet them as well (scroll down).

“TransCultural Exchange’s 2016 International Conference on Opportunities in the Arts exceeded all expectations. More than 600 people attended from every corner of the globe, offering exciting possibilities for artists to embrace different cultures, mindsets and technologies. Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi presented an inspiring talk on the Sharjah Foundation; Mischa Kuball unveiled his new workPara; Raffael Lorenzo Hemmer provided an interactive installation; MIT, the Harvard Art Museums and Biomedical Modeling offered tours and the Goethe Institut hosted a concert of new music. Panelists spoke about their international residency programs, provided practical advice, discussed how art can play a vital role in social or political interventions and promoted possibilities for artists to collaborate with those in other disciplines, including medicine, architecture, conservation and engineering. Tours, Workshops and Round Table discussions also gave artists with similar interests the chance to meet, network and talk about their work; and portfolio reviews supplied additional venues for artists to showcase their work.” (Featured image credit: Jie Yan)

Michelle Atherton is an artist based in London. Her work objectifies cultural phenomena as a means to investigate structures, systems and indeterminate preoccupations. She is interested in the resistance of space through the image and the construction of an insubordinate aesthetic. Most recent exhibitions include at RAF Cosford and the Tatton Park Biennale in the UK, the Zeppelin Museum and Kino Babylon in Germany, Linergallari Tallinn in Estonia and Dagmar de Pooter Gallery in Antwerp. Her work has been supported through the Arts and Humanities Research Council; and she is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University.https://www.shu.ac.uk/research/c3ri/people/michelle-atherton

TC McCormack is an artist based in London. His multidisciplinary practice is a creative and discursive site, considering a constellation of preoccupations, ranging from the shifting identity of materiality, the absence of human agency, the phenomenon of resistance space to language’s ability to delineate the relational affinities of forms. His work takes a variety of outcomes, often combining film, assemblage, publications, events and curation. His work has been shown at Platform in Istanbul, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Goethe Institute in New York, FACT in Liverpool, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast and LoBe in Berlin. He is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK.https://www.shu.ac.uk/research/c3ri/people/tc-mccormack

Rebecca Noone is a Canadian artist and a PhD student at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Her performance-based interventions and active archiving situations interrogate the banal futilities and the muted hopes implicit in our everyday encounters and interactions with information, systems and technologies. In her work, she has asked theoretical physicists how they cope with the mundane, compiled maps of hand-drawn directions collected from helpful passers-by, archived detritus in demolition-slated homes, built interactive library cataloguing systems and bartered the periodic table of elements at art shows. She has contributed to spaces and exhibitions in Canada, the US and Europe.http://rebeccanoone.com/

Bojana Panevska is artist, researcher and writer based in Amsterdam, where she graduated from the Audio-Visual Department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. She later received an MFA from the Sandberg Institute. For the past ten years, she has been developing the interdisciplinary project entitled “12 steps towards enlightenment.” Segments of it have been exhibited and published widely. In addition, since 2009, she has served as a project manager for international collaborations and a workshop facilitator at TransArtists, a leading web resource for artists around the world.http://artnews.org/artist.php?i=3888

Hamdy Reda is a visual artist and curator, living and working in Cairo. Alongside his artistic career, he is the founder, Managing Director and Curator of one of Egypt’s most well-known art spaces artellewa, a residency for domestic and international artists. Artellewa is a haven for the formation and activation of dialogue between artists and communities. His own work is as a painter and experimental photographer. He is well recognized in the North African and Middle Eastern region for his collaborative projects with other artists from Egypt and abroad. The recipient of various artistic awards, he seeks to further the creative dialogue within the public sphere while simultaneously informing his personal practice.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/simon-watson/five-things-to-know-about_hamdy-reda_b_6811710.html

Kira Simon-Kennedy is the Co-Founder of China Residencies, a directory and regional network of artist residencies in China. She is also a French and Mandarin translator for contemporary art publications and an independent film producer focused on projects centering around music and human rights in China, Iceland, France, Mali and Mississippi. She is currently a part of the inaugural Arts & Culture Social Impact Strategy program at Penn’s School of Social Policy & Practice.http://www.chinaresidencies.com/

Trishla Talera is the Director of TIFA Working Studios, a platform dedicated to exploring alternate avenues of art education in India. As the Director, she focuses on introducing student mentorship programs and residencies for young artists and designers to promote contemporary art and collaboration. A fiber artist from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), she is also the artistic director at Varsha Talera (a luxury bridalwear brand dedicated to the revival of Indian textile crafts), the chair of education at Young Indians (Yi CII) Pune and a shaper at Global Shapers Community Pune, an initiative by the World Economic Forum.http://tifa.edu.in/

Matej Vakula is a multi-media artist, educator, theorist, programmer, and a DIY enthusiast with a specialty in data visualization and urban issues. His work explores the impact of culture, technology and location on personal experience and social interrelationship. He is creating new methods of artistic research to produce models as places where multiple publics meet and interact, proposing new cultures or cultural experiences. He is observing roles of public knowledge in culture and technology, alongside with methods of how information is turned into knowledge and action, using art as a vehicle for this exploration. He has exhibited throughout Europe and the USA and, previously, was a faculty member at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. In 2012 was nominated for the prestigious Young Visual Artists Award in Slovakia. In 2013 he exhibited at the 6th Prague Biennial and was selected by the International Association of Art Critics as one of Slovakia’s best artists.http://vakula.eu/

Pau Cata has been working in the cultural field as a facilitator and curator for more than 10 years, including at the British Museum and at the White Cube Gallery in London. He has an MA in Critical Arts Management from London South Bank University, where he was awarded the Course Director Prize for Outstanding Achievement. He is currently the Coordinator of the artists-in-residency program at CeRCCa. As part of his job, he has developed numerous research projects in the field of artists-in-residencies in the Balkans and North Africa and has curated more than 12 exhibitions.https://paucata.com/

Yannick Franck is Belgium based sound artist, performer and curator. He is the Artistic Director of the art center Les Brasseurs in Liège, Belgium and owns the record label Idiosyncratics. Additionally he is part of the industrial-noise duo Orphan Swords and Founder of electroacoustic improvisation combo Y.E.R.M.O., which, among others, provided the sound for Pavilion of Luxembourg at the Venice Biennial in 2009.http://www.yannickfranck.com/

Marta Gracia is from Barcelona, Spain. She is the author of the research project Spanish Artist in Residence Programmes: an Overview, granted by the Catalan Arts Council in 2009, and the Founder and Director of Art Motile, the first platform for resources on Spanish artist-in-residence programs. She has a degree in Art History from the University of Barcelona and is responsible for the artistic research program at Hangar, one of Spain’s principle centers for art production. She has previously worked on the design, development, coordination and evaluation of art projects, organizations and networks in Albania, Italy, Japan and Spain.http://artmotile.org/